So exciting to see Drema and Skip under the arbor at Woody's! I'm glad they picked a decent weather day for their visit! One day when the timing is right we'll nab them over in our direction. Today was a busy day in the garden, pretty much like Chelone's efforts. Lots of cutting back of stuff in the yellow & blue garden, with just a few bits of eye candy left to enjoy. Today DH cut back all the asparagus and carted it away...a good start and a big help! Tomorrow I hope my friends will be able to come help me once more. So much left to do. Well Chelone, it may seem simple, but infant care is delicate tricky stuff with lots of intuition and guess work involved. This has been 4 weeks from He!! for DD. At the beginning it was a twisted uterus (requiring chiropractic attention), severe afterpains (involving heating pads, belly binding and ibuprofen) and mastitis (which is excruciating and requires painful nursing to help heal and antibiotics as well). Add to this the cough and cold which Skyler, Ivy, Sarah and Leo developed and which caused Sarah to stop breathing at times, and you can see that rest was not much of an option for her. The lack of weight gain in her third child was a mystery to her. So then it became apparent that Thrush was an issue for both Mom and Leo. So now both of them are on oral antifungal. Yesterday Sarah developed a pain below her knee on her calf, and a blood clot was suspected. All in all it has been a terrible beginning...and yet, Sarah feels she has bonded sooner and better with Leo than with Reed and Ivy. I am so proud of all she deals with! You can be sure that Skyler's mother takes advantage of these days to pursue childish games. Skyler too. Tonight he is to write many lines in regard to putting things away (bike & helmet) and taking responsibility for taking his medicines. He has been whining and stamping his feet lately... Oh the joys of being an "evil" stepmom, always wrong and supported by none. I think I'd help him pack his bags personally! I planted white anemones today (soaked last night) in Reed's garden for spring. I think there are only 1-2 plants yet to go in the ground. Tomorrow I hope to empty the last of the containers and save none of it. I simply don't have the energy to overwinter things this year. I am waiting for tulips and a few other bulbs, but no rush on planting those, even though we expect a killing frost this weekend. The pe4ach cobbler is beyond ready to take out of the oven!

In Central TX, it has been brutal here for over a month, more so than normal Summers. Yesterday was our 31st day of 100 or over and the 13th consecutive day of this. We are in "exceptional" drought. The weather man last night reported that this was the hottest Summer to date since they have recorded weather (1850). Yesterday was 104 and we were urged to reduce power usage in order to avoid rolling brown outs. Fun times!

Yes, got to love autumn. A wondeful time of year. We've already started having frosts. Brrrr... As to heating a hot house (sounds odd), you could try an internal trombe wall. Stack some bricks close to the glass (or plastic) but not hard up against it. They should absorb heat during sunny days and release it again at night or on overcast days. Your talented hubby might also be able to rig up a solar heater - black plastic pipes outside in sun, pump water through during day, store in black plastic tank inside hot house - black to both absorb and release heat. A second layer of insulation might also help - think giant rolls of bubblewrap! Eliot Coleman in his Four Seasons Harvest, a great book by the way, adds a second insulation layer to the plants - row covers for those things in the ground (he's got a huge hot house), garden fleece cloaks for the trees etc. Just some ideas.

I have not been pushing any limits in the heat the last couple of days. In fact, it is sort of the opposite. I watered the plants well on Thursday and only did minor work for an hour or two yesterday and have stayed away from the garden ever since. As I am typing this, it is 99 here and the heat index is 112 so y'all had better believe I'm smart enough to not be out there in this heat. We did the whole CostCo-Sam's Club run down to the metroplex today and stocked up on everything, so we're good for a couple of weeks. It is terrible when Saturday morning feels too hot to even run errands and shop, but it did....and we went out and did everything we needed to do anyway. Now the game plan is to stay indoors, stay cool and hydrated, and enjoy having our oldest granddaughter here for what is left of this weekend. Jennifer, Armenian cukes love the heat and are very disease-tolerant. They actually are melons and not cucumbers, but if harvested while on the small side, they are very cucumber-like and even can be used to make pickles. The larger they get, the more melon-like they become, but not a sweet melon---sort of bland. I harvest them small for us and let them get as big as possible for the chickens. On hot days, I cut an Armenian Cucumber in half and put it on the ground and the chickens peck away at the flesh until there's nothing left. They love them, and it helps to hydrate the chickens as well as just entertaining them. As soon as something else finishes up in my garden, probably pole beans or squash, I'll plant Armenian cukes so I will have them for the chickens when the real (ha ha, that's a joke) summer heat arrives in July and August. I would have planted them in the back garden this year, if I'd planted the back garden. Megan, I'm sorry to hear that about your beans. If I hadn't planted mine ridiculously early (March), I would be in the same boat. I've pulled one variety because of the spider mites, but the other three are still chugging along. I am watching to see if the blooms form new beans tomorrow and Monday during the cooler weather they say is coming. (I can't see it or feel it here yet, but a lot of y'all who are north of us are cooler today, so I just hope the cold front comes this far south as predicted and doesn't stall somewhere north of us.) That's unfortunate about the gray leaf spot. I hate diseases. I am going to have very low tolerance for anything/everything this summer and won't hesitate to yank out the plants that start looking pitiful or stop producing. I am not foolish enough to think I can baby these plants through a long, extra-hot and likely extra-dry summer. It is just easier to plant fresh plants in late June or early July for fall production. This year does bear some unfortunate similarities to 1998. We lived in Texas then, but already had purchased this land and were up here clearing the woods and working on fencing in our 14.4 acres every weekend. Sometimes we didn't get much done in one weekend between the heat and the dense jungle that was our woodland. I thought we'd die in the heat before we got the fencing done. I remember it was a horrific grasshopper year, and Bruce and I both are seeing signs of that already too. Jen, As the plant gets older it will put out more tall stems. Its' nature is to have a low bushy growth of foliage at the ground level and to send up the tall blooming stems. Just deadhead each one back after it blooms and it will make more. One of the nicknames for verbena bonariensis is verbena-on-a-stick and now y'all see why. Butterflies absolutely adore the blooms. Jennifer, We have those gigantic flies here. They are horrifyingly huge. Back when Chris was in school and they had to do that insect collection in Biology, our place was incredibly popular because the kids could come here and collect enough different insects in one day to have enough for their collection. Until we moved here, I'd never seen those gigantic flies either. Bolted onions can be chopped and frozen. Paula, I have found lemon grass works as well as anything else to repel flies. I agree too, it is the little things that matter. Amy, It looks like you hit Smashed Thumb at an awesome time! Have y'all noticed that on the FB gardening pages this week, there's tons and tons of tomato problems? It is mind-boggling, and I simply cannot believe how many photos we're seeing with herbicide damage, though we also are seeing plenty with plain old physiological leaf roll. I should get off this computer and go sweep and mop my floors. I just don't want to. Heat makes me lazy. Dawn